The soul of wit.(Ogden Nash: The Life & Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse)(Book Review)

Douglas M. Parker Ogden Nash: The Life & Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse. Ivan R. Dee, 336 pages, $27.50

For me, at any rate, the name "Ogden Nash" brings a smile to the lips and an itch to quote. Some poems stick easily in my increasingly diminished memory: "A little talcum/ Is always walcum." Alas, talcum is now most unwalcum--its silicates can cause death. But "Reflections on Ice-Breaking" will surely never date. "Candy/Is dandy/But liquor/ Is quicker." Most of my favorites, though, are too long to fit comfortably in my memory and the columns of The New Criterion. High in my high school pantheon, right up there with "Terence, this is stupid stuff" and "Do not go gentle into that good night," is "Very Like A Whale," Nash's anti-simile grouse against Byron's poem in Hebrew Melodies beginning "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold/And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold."

 
   In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in 
      our philosophy there are a great many 
      things, 
   But I don't imagine that among them there is a 
      wolf with purple and gold cohorts or 
      purple and gold anythings. 
   No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this 
      Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must 
      have some kind of proof; 
   Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy 
      tail and a big red mouth and big white 
      teeth and did he say Woof woof? 

The big difference between Nash and, say, Housman and Dylan Thomas is that it little profits a high school student, idle or not, to analyze him. As Groucho Marx said, "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. You can do it, but no one much enjoys it and the frog tends to die in the process."

Nash's background is roughly what you'd guess. Born in 1902, he grew up more than comfortably off until his early teens when his father's business started teetering. There was still enough money for prep school and a year at Harvard, perhaps more, but Nash wasn't all that interested. He lit out for New York and eventually ended up at Doubleday, first in advertising, then as an editor. The comic novelist Thorne Smith was one of his authors. Being an editor meant he read the reams of bad poetry that tumble over the transoms. Pollyanna-like, Nash decided it might be funny to write bad poetry on purpose: "As I sit in my office/On 23rd street and Madison Avenue/ I say to myself:/ You've a responsible position, havenue?" The rest, as they say, is history, and light verse paid the bills.

Nash could hold his own in Round-Table Manhattan, cracking wise with the likes of Dorothy Parker and S. J. Perelman and The New Yorker crowd. He did just fine in Hollywood, too, where he worked on The Firefly, a Jeannette MacDonald movie without Nelson Eddy. Back in New York, he aimed for Broadway, and did pretty well with Perelman and Kurt Weill in One Touch of Venus. Meanwhile, he was quite happily married and paternal to two daughters, Linell and Isabel: "In spite of her sniffle/Isabel's chiffle/Some girls with a sniffle/ Would be weepy and tiffle." He apparently drank a tad too much until his wife told him not to. Parker tells us he had spells of "depression and inability to write," but since the worst such spell lasted from the end of 1967 to the beginning of 1968, it doesn't sound too dire.

As you can see, Nash had appalling luck for a poet: he was happy, prolific, and financially stable. Nash was especially unlucky because chronologically if not temperamentally he is in the generation of Modernist poets, whose standard for significance is ...